Four Astounding Novellas

by Nat Schachner

  Then—it might have been minutes later, it might have been hours—Kay got up, ate sparingly of the bread, fed bits to canary and mouse, drank of the water. Listlessly she moved over the crystal, until her head stiffened, and her eyes jerked full on the prone figure of Jerry. Her startled look slid along the plane of polarized light. Her arms extended in involuntary appeal.

  There they were, two human beings, each enshrined in a sphere of shining crystal, separated by unimaginable barriers, alone in the vastnesses of a space time of their own contriving. It was agony to see each other, to gesture, to beckon, and approach no nearer.

  Yet, gradually, a measure of comfort grew on them. Somehow they evolved a system of code signals, semaphoring with angular positions of their arms, such as were employed by armies and navies in pre-radio days. They conversed, haltingly, it was true, but with unquenchable longing.

  The hours passed unheeded. The air was staling slowly, yet at first they did not notice. Then Jerry heard a faint “cheep.” The canary’s beak was wide, gasping for air. Its bright beady eyes implored the man to help it in its strange predicament. Slowly its feathers ruffled and it toppled, to lie a moveless, rumpled ball. The young man realized now what it meant. The atmosphere within the ball was foul and heavy. His eyes burned and his head ached. He signaled frantically to Kay.

  “Are you all right?”

  She pressed close to her prisoning glass and smiled bravely. “Quite, my dear.”

  But it was obvious she was in distress. They took counsel. Movement to be reduced to a minimum, breathing to be shallowed as much as possible. But it was plain they could not survive more than an hour. And then—

  “If only,” Kay signaled in anguish, “we were together, tight in each other’s arms. It would not matter so much, going out like this.”

  “I know,” Jerry answered wearily. He stared with grim, desperate eyes at the iron bar. He did not intend suffering the agonies of the damned from slow, horrible strangulation. A crashing blow with that heavy bar on the tourmaline, a jagged hole, and the swift rush of foul air into the space vacuum without would bring merciful release.

  He told Kay of that. The girl’s face was pale, but composed. “It’s the only way,” she agreed. She was breathing heavily now, and a blue tinge was creeping around her delicate nostrils.

  Slowly, inexorably, they lifted their respective bars of iron. Slowly, like automatons, they turned to each other. Separated in life by incredible barriers, perhaps in death they might once more be united. Who knew?

  “Afraid?” Jerry whispered. A mirthless smile twitched over his suffering face. She could not hear, of course.

  But she must have sensed what he said, for her head shook in brave negation. Her free hand lifted, went to her lips. A kiss wafted across the hyper space time for the first time in all its unthinkable existence.

  Together they lifted the bars. Great pulses pounded in Jerry’s temples. His eyes smarted and his lungs labored like bellows. He poised for the final signal that meant release from torture. He must hurry! Soon they would be too weak to bring the iron bars crashing. His left hand upraised. A twist of the wrist to the left, and Kay would know—

  He started the irrevocable movement, held it frozen half way, then reversed with frantic, pounding gesture.

  Things had been happening in their universe. Things that in their absorption in each other they had not noticed, or noting, failed to understand.

  One by one the phantom projections had misted and faded, and none had come to take their place. The backdrop, the flat distortions, shimmered and disappeared, as if a master showman was tiring of his show, and slowly but inexorably was turning out his lights.

  The strange, luminous gray of the ultrauniverse spread, gobbled up the blurring shapes. The colored flares were few in number now, and weakly flickering. But they seemed closer. The backdrop of eternal night closed in, was moving forward, shifting to the front of the stage, before the footlights, and advancing even as it faded and became a wraith out into the orchestral pit itself.

  A wan, orange glimmer surged over the tourmaline spheres, infolded them in a haze of swift vibration that shimmered and danced like fireflies on a night in June. Jerry cried out, dropped his bar. It drifted softly, like a feather, to the crystal. Then all else blotted out in the strange new glow, but not before he had seen Kay whirl and stare with frightened eyes out into the engulfing space.

  Suddenly he, too, was staring, forgetful of foul air, of nauseous headache. Something was outside his sphere. A blur of movement that shifted and gyrated with terrific speed. Formless, whizzing, yet somehow the thought hammered in Jerry’s oxygen-starved brain that there was something strangely human about its queer vibrations. At times it seemed that a face, distorted, twisted out of all imagining, peered in at him. But the vision was so instantaneous, so utterly fleeting, that Jerry laid it to the poisoned air that clogged his veins, the close approach of delirium.

  Yet he withheld that final blow. Instinct warned him to wait, even to the last gasp of suffocation. Within the echoing, semidarkened recesses of his brain he seemed to hear a voice, urging him to make no move. There were seconds when the eerie, formless blur disappeared, but it always returned. The intervals grew longer, the elongated face showed actually for split seconds of time. Certain tiny sounds tinkled in the tourmaline, as if—

  VII

  Jerry lay within the sphere, half delirious. The air was a fetid, noisome effluvium, which his lungs gulped and rejected. His throat was a fiery constriction, and darkness was filming his eyes. Perhaps that was why the orange glow seemed to become fainter and fainter, and the strange, superhuman face without steadied for seconds at a time, and the tinkling noises grew in intensity and duration.

  He was drifting, drifting. The light was dying, but rocket flares exploded in his head. Death stole slowly over him. There was a sudden grinding noise, a surge of something cold and biting, and consciousness left him—

  Memories of childhood struggled bewilderedly through Jerry as he opened his eyes. Surely that noble, well-proportioned being with the benignant, superhuman features who bent over him was of angelic descent. Even such had he seen depicted in the genius-intoxicated drawings of that strange madman and ecstatic visionary of the eighteenth century, William Blake.

  Something spoke within Jerry. It was not sound; it was not a voice; it was a series of thoughts incredibly impacting on his brain.

  “Do not be alarmed,” they soothed. “You are quite all right now. Breathe deeply.”

  Jerry obeyed the inner voice. It was good to draw into his tortured lungs the clean, sweet air.

  “But who are you,” he cried, “and how did you get inside the sphere?”

  The man smiled. It illumined and transfigured his mobile features, made him almost godlike in countenance. “Strange sounds issue from your lips, O being from another universe who yet resembles so closely our own kind. I do not understand them. They are harsh and discordant. But your thoughts impact on mine and I understand those. There is a tradition,” he mused, and the sentence pictures somehow arranged themselves in proper patterns to Jerry, “that in the misty, incredible antiquity of our own race it was necessary for primitive beings to make noises with their lips for communication.”

  “Then you have mastered telepathic conversation,” Jerry said in awed tones. He still spoke; it would take him a long time to achieve the disciplined ordering of thoughts that came so easily to his mentor.

  The man nodded. “For uncounted aeons now. But to answer your questions : I am Horgo, of the outpost galaxy, Andromede. A hundred thousand light journeys ago two spheres of strange design emerged with infinite slowness, out of the formless void into which we were hurtling. Our instruments detected them first, as the faintest of faint impingements of ether stresses on delicate dials. My great great ancestor, and Lika’s, too, famous scientists of that early time, discovered them.

  “Yet the spheres could not be seen, for the ether particles
held no vibration. A new, other-universe form of matter. They tried their mightiest forces, compounded of the last expiring gasps of stellar laboratories, to break them down, to penetrate their invisible, albeit rigidly impenetrable sheaths, without result.

  “My ancestor was a great scientist, I have said, far in advance of his time. Even then the universe was dying. The expanding effect of that first great explosion of primal central matter was losing momentum, in accordance with the inexorable laws of thermodynamics. Matter was dissipating into waves of energy; waves of energy were spreading and thinning out as the universe expanded and created new spacetime units on its far-flung outposts. Already the more central galaxies were dark and slowly vanishing. A moveless heat-death was holding them in thrall. Already the race of man had moved from the tiny galaxy it had inhabited since the farthermost reaches of time to the island universe of Oria. Then that, too, faded into the matterless, waveless uniformity of the heat-death.”

  Horgo stared out of the crystalline sphere at the gray waste with sad, weary eyes. The orange glow had gone; the flickering distortions were gone, nothing remained but gray, motionless nothingness. His thought processes slid into Jerry’s brain again.

  “From galaxy to galaxy we pushed, ever outward, until we reached Andromede, the last outpost. Here the race was forced to halt. Beyond was neither space nor time. Yet, still the primal energy was strongest here, the universe still expanding, and creating new units of space and time as it rushed outward. But this could not keep up forever. My ancestor realized that. His instruments showed the slowing up, the enormous dissipation of energy into rippleless waves. With a flash of genius he realized that these spheres, impenetrable to all their science, held perhaps the secret of a conservation of energy, of a self-contained system, that contradicted or defied the laws of thermodynamics.”

  Jerry had been hearkening to those inner thought patterns with growing amazement. Oria! Andromede! Good night! Those were the nebular galaxies he had known as Orion and Andromeda. Then he was back in his own universe, and Horgo, this superhuman, was perhaps the last mighty representative of his own race, left far behind in the dim reaches of Earth. His brain whirled. They had returned, been swallowed by the ceaseless expansion, but unimaginable billions of years into the future, when the universe had degraded into that moveless heat-death bath of which even in his primitive day certain scientists had spoken.

  Horgo’s face lighted. He had read Jerry’s spinning thoughts. “Yes,” he sent his patterns across, “we must be members of the same race. The extremities of time have met. The first primitive form and the very last. For nowhere else in the universe did we men who first had sprung from the tiny speck called Erd ever find life like ours. But to continue:

  “My ancestor was short-lived. In those days lives did not extend beyond a thousand light journeys. Nor were his instruments as advanced as they were later to become. He labored mightily to break through those invisible spheres of locked-in energy. He did not succeed. His sons took up the task. They failed, too, but they managed to invent an infra-camera which photographed by a negative process. The lacunae in the ceaseless flow of wave impulses that permeate the entire universe registered on the disks by their very lack of energy.

  “So it was that you and your sister sphere first became visible. Judge of their surprise to find two beings in their hollow shells, rudimentary, it is true, but nevertheless somewhat similar to themselves. Unfortunately the pair seemed dead. They neither moved nor budged from their unnatural, rigid positions. A state of death or cataleptic trance at best. A lifetime of observation showed no change. But they did not give up their task, and took thousands on thousands of negative photographs of the spheres.”

  Jerry shivered as he considered what that meant. Thousands of time units of the order of light years had flashed by in the outer universe while he, inside the sphere, had not yet completed the simplest gesture. And Kay! The memory of her jerked him into awareness. He caught Horgo’s arm in a grip of steel. His voice clanged harshly. “The girl in the other crystal globe! She is dying while we are doing nothing. You must rescue her at once.”

  Horgo winced at the crude concussions of sound. It was evident that uncouth noises had been obliterated from the dying universe along with speech. “You need not blast at me with frightful clamor,” he observed mildly. “Think the thoughts you wish and I shall understand. But have no fear for the girl. Lika has entered her orb and even now is ministering to her wants. Her thoughts are a steady flow in my brain.”

  Jerry dropped Horgo’s hand. Joy tingled in his veins. As long as Kay was alive— “Thank you,” he started to say, caught himself, and thought it.

  Horgo smiled approvingly. “That is better. To return to my narrative: It was in the next generation that the accumulated photographs showed that you were not dead. Your positions had changed, though to no great extent. That heartened the workers. They had discovered the secret of lengthening their lives to fifty thousand light journeys, though it was left to Lika and myself to find the true secret of immortality.

  “An immortality”—he smiled sadly— “that seemed profitless and horrifying. For the universe was fast dying. It was only by the most tremendous exertions that we were able to concentrate sufficient of the feeble energy flow of almost vanished matter to keep ourselves intact, to keep our apparatus functioning. Soon that, too, would be gone. Yet ever, before our very eyes, were the visible signs that some one had discovered the secret of immuring energy in potential form. For we realized by now that you were alive, that your infinitely slow movements were the product of the infinitely slow corresponding motions of your constituent ether units.

  “So we redoubled our efforts. Your spheres gradually grew to a hazy type of visibility, as our ether units slowed wearily down. If only we could break through before the moveless sea of thermal death sapped the last supply of our energies!

  “The few who survived with us succumbed, one by one, fading slowly from view as their protons and electrons dissipated in a slow disintegration. We alone were left, Lika and I. Soon we, too, would fade into nothingness. Then, by a lucky accident, Lika stumbled on the solution. We staked every available source of energy on a last mighty effort. We floated in a sphere of force of our own contriving. The waveless, featureless universe nibbled sluggishly at its outer shell, contracting it slowly, but perceptibly, about us.

  “With bated breath we threw the beams upon the spheres. With delight we saw them grow in clarity, saw them open along the beam path. The mighty concentrated forces, the essence of the universe, thrust aside the static unbreakability of your units, held them open long enough for us to push ourselves along the path and enter with the supplies we needed. Then the beams flickered and were spent, and the universe-resistant spheres swung back into place.”

  There was almost admiration in his piercing glance. “To think that you, of an unimaginable primitiveness in time, could have discovered this principle that, in all the intervening ages, had never been rediscovered.”

  Jerry started to explain, but Horgo’s thought patterns stopped him. “You need not tell me. I know everything now; the principle you employed, the method. Remember I can read every thought that passes through your mind.”

  “Then no doubt you have read this, too.” Jerry found himself moving his lips in spite of himself. It was terribly difficult to think coherently without speech. “What will be our fate?"

  Horgo looked quizzically at him. “Fate? We shall live and have our beings within these spheres. Lika and I have the means of renewing air and food pellets indefinitely. Our time processes are slowed, yet to us they shall seem quite normal. That will give us an immortality of meditation and exchange of thoughts. For we shall teach you those secrets, also. Death shall come to us only in that vastly distant future when the infinitely slow vibrations of our ether units dissipate into the dead universe about us. By that time we shall have meditated sufficiently long to have achieved complete absorption into the final secrets
of space time and beyond. Then we shall welcome death. For nothing will be left.”

  VIII

  Jerry made a gesture of distaste. Such inactive contemplations were not to his fancy. At least, however, if Kay were at his side— An irresistible longing coursed through him. Her lovely face rose before him in tantalizing detail; her warm, red lips, her merry eyes, that curve of throat—

  “It is an unappetizing future you outline,” he told the man of the future quietly. “But perhaps it will be bearable should Kay Ballard, the girl I love, share it with me. You must bring the spheres together, so that the four of us, your Lika and my Kay, may join us in that endless contemplation of yours.”

  Horgo looked at him in surprise. “But why?” he queried. “Why do you require physical contact with the girl you picture as loving. I do not understand that pattern. It is an incomprehensible thought which I have never read before. You will be able to exchange your flow of ideas with her. I shall teach you how. What more do you wish?”

  Jerry restrained his surging vehemence. How could he explain his primitive emotions to this highly intellectualized man of the future? Love had died out of the universe aeons before; that strange longing to be with your beloved, to breath the air she breathes.

  “Nevertheless,” he answered slowly, painfully, “I must insist upon our joining each other. It is a need that you do not have, that has evidently been bred out of the race. But we are from that long-distant past, Kay and I, when life was savorless without a mate, without some one to share your joys and sorrows in the flesh as well as by the impersonal coldness of distant telepathic communication.”

  Horgo shook his head in wonderment. “It was a strange time you lived in,” he declared. “But the thing is impossible. Our beams of force were exhausted in the last mighty effort to penetrate your spheres; we have no other.”